Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (25 page)

Chapter 13

I am exactly
five feet, two inches tall. I was more than a head taller than Cameron, and supposedly a head is about ten inches long. So I would say that Cameron was just over four feet tall. Four feet and a couple of inches. He had hair the black of a stovepipe and the tiniest little ski jump for a nose. Once I tried to write a poem about what he looked like, but I just got depressed. I ripped the paper into shreds. I still know the first couplet, but I can’t bring myself to say it.

His eyes were green.

His mummy bag was red. His mummy bag twine was blue.

The first day after Cameron and I met, I tried to turn him in. It was one thing for me to live like a lunatic hobo, but it was another thing for a nine-year-old kid. I explained to him why even with his incredibly awesome mummy bag he couldn’t live on the streets, but he was pretty firm. He said he would not go back to a foster home. I told him there were plenty of great foster homes, but he didn’t believe me. (In truth, I’m not sure I believed me.) So I decided I would just bring him to the police station on North Avenue. I knew where it was. But he figured out where we were going and took off. I would say he took off like a shot, but that would be a serious exaggeration: he went as fast as he could with a huge black plastic garbage bag in his arms, which was not very fast.
Watching him run was actually kind of comic. Fortunately, I’d cadged some money on Church Street, so after I’d caught up with him I was able to win him back. I brought him with me to Muddy Waters, that hipster coffee joint Andrea had shown me, and bought us both hot chocolates with whipped cream. (Now
that’s
living large.) This was when he showed me his robot made of duct tape.

I remember I was kind of afraid that some grown-up would see us and think I was his babysitter and I was the one who had given him his black eye. But no one seemed to care, which is kind of interesting in and of itself.

I still thought I might go to the police station without Cameron and ask whoever was there to keep their eyes out for a nine-year-old boy with a mummy bag. I kept this as an option in the back of my mind.

Two days after we met, Cameron told me that he had almost no memories of his mom and none of his dad. He never met his dad. He said he got confused about whether some of the things he remembered were from when he was a toddler and still living with his mom and his grandparents, or whether they were from his days in his first foster home.

We were sitting in the sun down by the lake, which was rock-solid frozen. But the sky was blue like a sapphire, and with the exception of the seagulls, the world felt very still. The seagulls, of course, were crazy. I love seagulls, especially the giant ones that will walk right up to you and practically threaten you into giving them your bread. I also love to watch them fly. Unlike some birds, seagulls always look to me like they enjoy flying. (Not all birds, of course, make flying look like a chore. I think barn swallows are having a blast, too.) Anyway, I used to really enjoy the seagulls. That might just mean that I had nothing better to do a lot of the time that winter, but there are worse ways to kill an hour or two
than watching seagulls until it gets too cold, and then going to the library and reading till the place closes for the night.

It sounded like Cameron’s mom was rail thin and always pretty strung out. At least based on the way he described her she was strung out. I’m thinking crystal meth. But he never said she was a druggie. I’m just making a guess from a few of his clues. He remembered her as pretty old. Thirties, he thought. She was no teen mom, in other words. He had grandparents in a town south of Burlington called Shoreham, but his grandfather was seriously violent. He was always whaling on Cameron’s grandma and mom and Cameron when they were all living together. His grandparents had an apple orchard up a hill from Lake Champlain and Cameron recalled it was huge. Of course, when you’re a little kid, everything’s huge. For all I know, it was five apple trees in the backyard. When he’d been in the first grade, he confessed, the apple trees had spooked him. He half expected them to come to life in the night and start hurling apples at him. Or they would do things much worse. Unlike the trees in
The Wizard of Oz
, these bad boys could walk. In Cameron’s imagination, they stomped from the orchard to the house and smashed in his bedroom window, climbed inside, and stabbed him to death with splintered branches.

I think his mom might have been cooking meth at his grandparents’ house, which was probably one of the reasons why his grandpa was beating the crap out of everybody. Meth causes all kinds of trouble. One time the police came to the orchard—at least Cameron thought maybe this happened.

He couldn’t tell me how he had wound up in that first foster home or any of the details of why his mom had abandoned him. He had no idea if his mom was alive or dead. Sometimes he would tell me he hoped she was alive and she’d get her act together and find him.

“Want me to find her for you?” I’d ask. I figured I could begin by asking someone at the shelter for grown-ups. It was on the other side of Burlington from the teen shelter. I went to their day station
sometimes and was able to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (You have no idea how good a peanut butter and jelly sandwich can taste until you’ve lived in an igloo made of trash bags.) Like the social workers at the teen shelter, everyone there seemed nice enough. And, of course, I could have gone to the police. But how would I do that without having to confess that I knew where Cameron was? If I had to guess, I would have said that Cameron’s mom was in jail: the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, maybe. It was right across the street from a great bakery. Yup, razor wire and baguettes. I knew where it was. But Cameron never wanted me to investigate. I think he was worried that he’d just wind up back in another foster home—which, of course, was a risk. It was a risk for him, and it was a risk for me. And there was also the chance that someone would figure out that Abby Bliss was really Emily Shepard and just hate me to death.

But maybe Cameron was also afraid that all we’d find out was that his mom really was dead, and then he’d have nothing to hope for. (Been there, done that.)

Or maybe he just knew what a seriously shitty mother his mom was. After all, she’d deserted him, right? I didn’t even know her, and I kind of hated her for peacing out on her kid. That’s just nasty. I mean, obviously I wasn’t his mom, but already I’d figured out that I had some responsibility for him. And that winter I took that responsibility very seriously. No matter what, I was going to keep him safe. No one, not while I was around, was ever again going to punch that little guy in the face. No one. No, sir.
My
life had stood a loaded gun.

I love it when the snowflakes are flying like butterflies.

You probably think that’s the start of one of my poems. Nope.

It’s something my mom once said. She was standing in the den and looking out the window at our backyard and the edge of
the woods in the distance. The forest was mostly pine trees, but there were a few maples, too. (Maples make me recall sugaring and syrup, and someday I have to tell you about the sugarhouse rager. That was kind of a fiasco, too.) My mom’s back was to me, but she knew I was there. It was about five in the afternoon, toward the end of February, so the light was just starting to fade. And the flakes were huge and fluttering and seemed to be almost rocking back and forth, back and forth, to the ground. They were falling very slowly.

My mom said unexpectedly beautiful things like “the snowflakes are flying like butterflies” a lot. Remember, her name was Mira. She could be exotic. Poetic. Surprising.

The snow looked like that to me one day when Cameron and I were standing under the eaves of this theater down by the waterfront. It was closed that afternoon, so no one was there and we were safe. I remembered what my mom had said about snowflakes and told Cameron. I thought he would like it. I guess he did. But he said, “Butterflies don’t live much longer than snowflakes. Most butterflies only live, like, a week or two.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, but I was pretty sure it was true. I just wanted to know where he’d learned this little bit of knowledge. Who tells a little kid that butterflies die in a couple of days?

He shrugged. “A teacher.”

“Wow. You had pretty serious teachers.”

“I don’t know. She wasn’t our teacher very long. One night she drank this Windex stuff and got sick. The principal said she thought it was Kool-Aid. They’re both blue, right?”

I nodded. The principal had obviously been lying to the kids. No one mistakes Windex for Kool-Aid. “Did she die?”

“No. But she never came back to school.”

So, to answer my own question: Who tells a little kid that butterflies only live for a couple of days? A seriously depressed, suicidal schoolteacher. That’s who.

I’m sure there are a lot of great foster parents and foster families out there. I really am. Unfortunately, Cameron never got any of them. He got the dad and mom who went to jail for making kiddie porn out of his foster home sisters. He got the mom who pushed her foster kids—all three of them, even Cameron—face-first into dog shit when his six-year-old foster sister had diarrhea and trashed the bedsheets. He got the dad who slugged him so hard that he got that black eye.

And, of course, he had his memories, dim as they were, of his own flesh and blood. His mom. His grandpa.

Is it really any wonder that he wasn’t about to trust anyone older than me?